Thursday on CNN’s “The Lead,” while discussing the pay-to-play accusations between then-Secretary Clinton’s State Department and her family’s organization the Clinton Foundation, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said there was no evidence Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton engaged in any “illegality or impropriety.”
On Hillary Clinton’s negative poll numbers, Schiff said, “I think what they reflect is that ever since she left the job of secretary of state where she was widely revered, and she became a potential candidate for president, there has been a concerted and I think successful effort by the GOP to tear her down. I don’t think you or I would do much better. Some of that fall is inevitable, but the portrait is simply not the secretary that those of us that know her, know her to be.”
He added, “I agree, but if you look at the Clinton foundation, the contacts with the Clinton foundation supporters, no one revealed any evidence that the secretary of the state department did something for those donors. There has never been any evidence of any illegality or impropriety. Some of them were noble prize winners or heads of state, and you expect that to be the case. Is that responsible for the numbers declining? I don’t think so, not without the fuel added by the consistent Republican attacks. Yes, there are fair questions for journalists in all of this. But I think that at the end of the day, going from one of the most respected women in the world, that she still is, but to have the numbers that you are showing us today, I think it would not have been the case without many tens of millions if not hundreds of millions spent really to tear her down and drive up her negatives as one of our Republican leadership said so pointedly was the whole point of the Benghazi select committee.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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